JPS : a distributed persistent Java system

Abstract

Distributed persistent object systems provide a convenient environment for applications that need to manage complex long-lived data. Since Java has no persistence model built into it, the tremendous growth in the popularity of Java has generated a lot of interest in systems that add persistence to Java. This thesis presents the design, implementation and performance evaluation of a Java Persistent Store called JPS. JPS is an efficient distributed persistent Java system built on top of the Thor object-oriented database. JPS provides several advantages over other persistent Java systems. Unlike most of other systems, JPS is a distributed system that allows multiple clients to simultaneously access the object store. JPS is built to be used over a wide area network and scales well with large databases. JPS also provides a very reliable and highly available storage. More importantly, JPS offers significantly better performance for many important types of workloads. The original Thor system that used Theta as the database programming language has been extensively compared to other OODBs and shown to consistently outperform other systems - sometimes by more than an order of magnitude - under a wide variety of commonly used workloads. Our performance results indicate that JPS performs almost as well as the Theta-based system.